State-of-the-art wastewater treating operations work in three stages. In the first stage solid waste materials are separated from the water and in the other two stages oxygen is injected into wastewater for bacteria to metabolize the waste therein. These two latter stages require technologies that are expensive to install, difficult to maintain and expensive to operate because they are energy intensive. To combat the rising energy costs associated with conventional wastewater treatment, “Wetland” treatment technologies have been applying the inherent ability of aquatic macrophyte plants to oxygenate their immediate aqueous environment stimulating the metabolism of waste-consuming bacteria to do the same work as they do in conventional facilities using nothing more than the sun's energy and a little wind. These technologies capitalize on this simple and “free” phenomenon to treat wastewater with the same efficacy as conventional wastewater treatment facilities with virtually no operating costs. However, “Wetland” projects have several significant drawbacks since they require very large tracts of land and the porous substances making up the filters of the treatment ponds may become saturated with unprocessed waste requiring their replacement or prolonged recycle times for the entire facility. More importantly, these projects have no way to regulate the amount of time wastewater is exposed to waste consuming bacteria in an oxygenated environment, and, at times such as after an intense rain storm, can let insufficiently treated effluent pass through the facility.
Research related to “Wetland” treatment processes has been found emergent macrophyte varieties are extremely efficient in transmitting the air from the wind flowing through their canopies to their roots and rhizomes making them ideal for oxygenating wastewater. These plants have been found to naturally form “mats” on the surface of water and that these formations injected very large amounts of oxygen into the water without establishing roots in the sediments. In nature these “mats” form when individual groups of plants break away from the plant colonies near the shores and float on the surface because of the gas spaces in their rhizomes and the decomposing dead plants in the mat. Thus, amongst the patents related to the formation of “floating mats”, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,799,440; 6,322,699; 7,776,261; and 8,250,808 stand out as providing the means of emulating a process that occurs in nature. These approaches to the formation of “mats” usually establish a certain amount of young plants upon floating devices and let them reproduce till a “floating mat” is formed. Although this approach requires much less space than conventional “Wetland” projects do, because they create very dense “mats” some wastewater usually flows underneath these without being evenly exposed to the waste-consuming bacteria.